Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

French, from Old French, from Late Latin impostūra, from Latin impostus, variant of impositus, past participle of impōnere, to place upon; see impose.

Examples

It could not be at the fact that, for all your hollow proclamations of the auteur's commitment to the work alone, this imposture is actually an artifical bolstering of a self-esteem that's actually quite frail and flimsy.

But Soa knew well enough that this was but the beginning of the struggle, and that, though it might be comparatively easy for Juanna and Otter to enter the city, and impose themselves upon its superstition-haunted people as the incarnations of their fabled gods, the maintenance of the imposture was a very different matter.

If we read Polidori's figurative vampirism as something more than self-pity, his "imposture" is less postmodern playfulness than it is something far more sinister--the "glamour of imposture" as something poisonous to both the performer and the performed.

This "imposture," in Rosen's opinion, has an intimate connection with bibliography, though he never explains how bibliography causes the editor to take down the 1850 Prelude from the shelf (an easy, objective choice, according to Rosen) instead of the 1805 model (an awkward, subjective motion).

Once, though I felt it to be a kind of imposture, I got a speech by heart, and doubtless it might have been a very pretty one, only I forgot every syllable at the moment of need, and had to improvise another as well as I could.